Worlds Elsewhere (28 page)

Richard III
yet again … The play seemed to be everywhere. But why? Borthwick wasn't much help: ‘[The farce] was very creditably performed,' he concluded, ‘but under the peculiar circumstances of the case, it did not sound to me nearly so absurd as the tragedy.'

In a folder at the museum collections I came across a stray photograph – a nineteenth-century theatre just over the mountains in Nevada. The photograph was in colour, dating (I guessed) from the late 1940s or early 1950s, shortly before the theatre was demolished. A low stage, pine floor, two levels of red-plush boxes either side of the proscenium arch; hard wooden chairs in the stalls. Plastered around the safety curtain, which featured a bucolic scene of what appeared to be Tuscany, were crude hand-drawn advertisements for local businesses:
AMERICAN BAKERY: PIES, CAKES AND BREAD … RYAN & STENSON: DRY GOODS, GENTS OUTFITTERS, HATS ETC … SAWDUST CORNER SALOON: WINES, LIQUORS & CIGARS.

The gilt decoration was peeling, the pink-and-green paint pitted and stained with damp. On the ceiling, the plaster was coming off in sheaves. But if one squinted carefully, one could just about see a bearded figure painted above the centre of the stage: Shakespeare, presiding deity and the most popular playwright of the American frontier.

Before I lit out for the Nevada foothills in pursuit of the actors, I had a date. Following the advice of a friend, I had booked to see a show at the California Shakespeare Theatre in Berkeley. In the best Western traditions, it was a big-boned tragedy, indeed the biggest of them all:
Hamlet.
For added frontier-style authenticity, it was in the open air, at the Bruns Amphitheatre in the Orinda foothills.

‘Just make sure you layer,' my friend had said. ‘It gets kind of fierce up there at night.' I thought of all the times I'd attended outdoor Shakespeare in England – shivering on damp grass to the faint aroma of manure – and reckoned I could survive.

The quickest route to Berkeley was east over the grey spans of the Bay Bridge, but I was determined to leave San Francisco in style: north over the Golden Gate. By the time I got there, the towers were glowing like molten steel, crimson in the late-afternoon sun. In the
rear-view mirror fog was still shrouding the city, a purplish cloud from which towers and high-rises occasionally protruded. It had the pleasing appearance of a disaster scene I had narrowly escaped.

Just before Orinda I swung the car right and pulled on to a narrow asphalt track that wound up through the woods. We were only fifteen minutes past the university bookstores and gourmet coffee shops of Berkeley, but this was decisively hill country. Grasslands and knots of tawny rock reared steeply either side. The hills, beaten to gold by the heat of summer, were shading into copper. For the first time in two weeks in America, I felt as though I was outside.

The parking lot was a field; and already, with an hour and a half to go before the performance, three-quarters full. We were a genial lot, the early crowd – in our fifties and sixties, mostly, wearing hiking gear and stoutly booted. There was a worrying quantity of fleeces and gloves. One woman had two sleeping bags sausaged under her arms. I began to wish I had taken my friend's warning seriously.

The California Shakespeare Theatre was a child of the early seventies, a hippyish artistic collective that had gathered to stage
Hamlet
in a church in downtown Berkeley. Expanding into a summer-long festival majoring in Shakespeare, it had staged more than fifty productions before moving up here to a purpose-built amphitheatre in the forest.

I climbed through dense thickets of cedar and oak, the tang of pine needles strong on the breeze. Cal Shakes relished its outdoorsy reputation, even if nature had been somewhat declawed. When I reached the top of the hill, it was to benches and refreshment stalls dotting the glades. The queue for the buffet (signature dish: The Hamlich) was thriving. It reminded me faintly of the summer opera festival at Glyndebourne in Sussex, though instead of dinner jackets and evening gowns here the tailoring was by North Face. I inspected the wine menu: as heavyweight as one would expect.

Presiding over this fine example of wholesome Northern California living was Jonathan Moscone, Cal Shakes' artistic director. Stoutly built, with a silvering goatee, he was clad in a bulky cardigan and had the aspect of an ageing software developer.

If I couldn't get hold of a living and breathing nineteenth-century Californian actor-manager, I figured Moscone was a decent substitute. A San Francisco native, he had run Cal Shakes since 2000 and was by all accounts making a roaring success of it. Audience numbers were up
for the third year in a row, and Moscone himself had recently received an award for his work in regional arts. The company was on a roll.

Shakespeare wasn't the only thing they produced, said Moscone, but the major reason Cal Shakes was doing well was the Bard.
Hamlet
had extended its run a week after opening, having scored the largest advance sales in the theatre's thirty-year history. I caught something I'd rarely glimpsed in the eyes of an American theatre producer: the sight of accumulating dollar bills.

‘At first I thought they were mistyping the numbers. I thought we'd never make so much.
Hamlet
's a big-ass play, three and a half hours sitting outside on a bench. You've got to know it's long, right? But this time they've really gone for it.'

We talked through which other titles were safe bets. He mentioned
Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew
– plays that had also done well in these parts during the nineteenth century.

‘They're big plays, I guess. They seem to fit here. We had the same with our version of
Nicholas Nickleby.
Big stories.' He glanced at the forest around us, beginning to twinkle with fairy lights. ‘You know, the East Coast is small – the cities are big, but the states are small, the houses are small. Here, the hills are not small.'

The American festival circuit, of which Cal Shakes is a well-established part, told its own story about the success of Shakespeare in the United States. There are now at least 250 Shakespeare festivals in operation in the US, more than anywhere else in the world by a comfortable margin. Some American festivals inhabit beautifully appointed theatres in historic settings, such as the Virginia Blackfriars or the replica of the London Fortune playhouse at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, a few hundred miles north of where Moscone and I were sitting. Nearly all have repertoires centred on Shakespeare, but some have swelled into permanent producing houses offering everything from Marlowe to adaptations of Disney's
The Little Mermaid.
Others, in the best Western traditions, are fly-by-night travelling outfits: Montana Shakespeare tours isolated rural communities and parks with a handful of actors, covering thousands of miles annually.

According to figures compiled in the mid-1990s, over three million tickets were sold annually at Shakespeare festivals in the United States. If one factors in free events – including such institutions as New York City's Shakespeare in the Park, set up in the 1950s – nowadays the
numbers would be even higher. Festivals such as these are the way most Americans still encounter live Shakespeare.

As the audience began to move towards the auditorium, I rattled on about my discoveries in the Museum of Performance and Design. Moscone knew it all, having once directed a show on the subject by the contemporary playwright Richard Nelson. I liked the play's title:
How Shakespeare Won the West.
As it happened, Nelson had also written a play about the Astor Place Riot.

I wondered if Moscone ever dreamed of the 1850s, the pit heaving with miners, the shuddering pinewood floor …

His eyes acquired a faraway look. ‘Man. Yeah. Wouldn't it be fabulous if we could do shows like they did? People shouting the lines back with them, throwing them dollars, or they'd just stop in the middle and start playing a song?'

He pounded the table. ‘That. Would. Be. Fucking. Awesome.'

The audience for
Hamlet
was on its best behaviour, and there were no songs that I could hear, if one discounted the crickets thrumming loudly all around and the occasional sorrowing howl of a coyote.

Next to me in the crowd, a man in a green cap with the logo of the Gallo winery lifted a bottle in greeting. He appeared to be on the single-estate Cab Franc.

The setting was undeniably spectacular. The broad sweep of the amphitheatre – a slender doughnut of steel girders, with a wide stage in front and stepped terraces – echoed the Globe in London, except that instead of the Thames and St Paul's cathedral we had a fine view of the Orinda hills, now mottling to dark green and grey in the gloom. Above it, the sky was the colour of sapphire.

I had come expecting this
Hamlet
to be traditional, but I was surprised. The production was set in a decaying mansion that could have been deep in the Hollywood hills or just outside Cupertino, where Apple have their headquarters. Centre stage was an empty swimming pool filled with discarded toys and smashed lawn furniture. Sharp tailoring and military uniforms were the order of the day; only the play-within-the-play was done, knowingly, in Elizabethan ruffs and doublets. Old Hamlet, blood-soaked, looked as though he'd done a stint in a zombie movie. Hamlet, played by LeRoy McClain, was a soulful tough guy who brought to mind
the young Denzel Washington. He sobbed ‘To be, or not to be' while clutching Ophelia in his arms. (It emerged that both actors were in fact Brits who now worked in the US: an echo of their forebears.)

Barnardo's exclamation during the night-watch opening scene, ‘'tis bitter cold', produced a rueful laugh among the audience. But there were consolations: it was the only
Hamlet
I'd seen where the Ghost's appearance was complemented by the rising Plough, seven pinpricks of faint light in the night sky. Just once, much later on, there was the diamond glint of a meteor.

Stumbling down to the car in the dark, I saw a poster. ‘Why Go to the Movies and Be Exposed to Wanton Sex, Needless Profanity and Gratuitous Violence?' it asked. ‘Experience It Live.'

I was up and out not long after dawn, sprinting for the 1-80 with a motley flotilla of pickups, people carriers bulky with bikes and boats, and the rest of the demob-happy weekenders.

Passing through Berkeley the day before, I had called by the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. The name appealed for obvious reasons, but there was more to it than that. Searching online for something appropriate to read in the mountains, I had found a copy of one eyewitness account of the touring life, Walter M. Leman's
Memories of an Old Actor
(first edition, 1886). Shakespeare & Co. had it in stock, a steal at six bucks.

The book was foxed, a little battered, but sturdy enough – epithets that also suited the author. In the frontispiece engraving, Leman's shoulder-length white hair was combed back in a shaggy bonnet, surrounding stout, squat features. Beneath bustling eyebrows, his eyes were firm and sharp. I tried to picture him on stage. Not Hamlet; more like T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, an attendant lord. An eerily plausible Polonius.

Leman certainly had Polonius's chatter. His style was breathless and gossipy, a garrulous gale of names and second-hand tales and recollections of theatrical figures I recognised dimly, if at all. Had he been standing at the crush bar, I would have shrunk from his presence. Here, between hard covers I could close at any time, I warmed to his company.

Leman was born in 1810 and had been theatre-mad from the beginning. One of his earliest theatrical memories – so he said – was
watching Edmund Kean forced in ignominy off the stage in Boston. He had met the grandson (or was it the great-grandson?) of Lewis Hallam, the man who had brought professional drama to America. He claimed intimacy with Edwin Forrest, having played ‘various times' with him. On this last, I believed him, particularly his doleful portrait of the later Forrest, crushed by a lengthy divorce case and reduced to doing regional tours for a pittance.

Leman had an actor's tic when it came to describing other performers – vague effusion with the occasional enlivening bout of pure bitchery. He was delightfully catty about James Henry Hackett's pretensions to tragedy (‘the public never recognised his claim'), and studiedly offhand about Dickens, whom he saw in Montreal and accused of gabbling his lines.

The contents page mapped anywhere and everywhere. Leman travelled north to Portland, Maine; played Montreal and Philadelphia; then struck out for California in 1854. He had come back again and again, before chasing the Silver Rush into Nevada. There was a ton of material here. I awarded him a ceremonial scattering of Post-its, details to be investigated later.

Leman wasn't my only companion. The North American Shakespeare festival circuit had produced another boon besides ticket sales: one of the finest through-composed pieces of jazz in musical history. Before leaving Britain, I had downloaded to my iPod a copy of Duke Ellington's
Such Sweet Thunder.
Inspired by a residency at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, in 1956, Ellington and his long-time musical partner Billy Strayhorn had composed an entire suite on Shakespearian themes.

Thirty-five minutes and twelve movements long, longer than Copland's
Appalachian Spring
and twice the length of Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue,
the album had filled my hire cars on our rambles through Virginia and California. ‘Lady Mac' – which began with playfully profane gospel-ish chords by the Duke before segueing into a sashaying dance number – had enlivened numerous traffic jams in Washington. ‘Madness in Great Ones', Ellington's slithering, beserkly chromatic tribute to Prince Hamlet, had popped up while I was on the way back from Cal Shakes. I had a soft spot for ‘Sonnet in Search of a Moor', a poignant solo for Jimmy Woode's strummed double bass, with its nobly aspiring yet fatally naive melody.